This study used border theory to understand the learning experiences of student teachers transitioning from campus-based learning to classroom teaching. For teacher candidates learning to teach English as a second language in primary schools in Hong Kong, crossing institutional borders during practicums was highly complex, due to the conflicting expectations, agendas and cultures of university classrooms and elementary schools. School-based mentors played an important role in maintaining or dismantling institutional borders, thus enabling or constraining knowledge transfer across domains. The findings may help educators to create a third space in which student teachers can connect campus-based learning to school practice.
[Copyright of Teaching & Teacher Education is the property of Elsevier Ltd.]

The paper focuses on the close collaborative work our research team has been engaged in with two local schools to study how action research measures may help to facilitate the improvement of the Integrated Humanities (IH) curriculum through school-university partnerships. It attempts to understand action research as a form of cultural practice for education, and examines how such collaborative work with local schools may contribute to sustainable cultural work of education and intervene at different levels of the schooling practices. In all, the paper seeks to offer preliminary analysis and reflection on the re-orientation of Cultural Studies as a research and problem-solving, intellectual and critical project with a potential for long-term input to cultural policy-making. It also aims at examining the role of cultural studies practitioners as action researchers in the process of doing cultural work of education.
[Copyright of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.534586]